| Date | |
|---|---|
| Author | DCM |
| Categories | Events |
BBH delivered a reflective talk on Tuesday at Advertising Week Europe, with comparisons on the structure of the advertising industry from two employees who both started as grads there two decades apart. Rebecca Sampson, Junior Designer, Digital Cinema Media (DCM) reports.
Gyn Jones, of the class of ’87 and now Group CEO at BBH, immediately raised a chuckle with an anecdote of two contrasting days in his early employment at BBH, a glamorous overseas Levi’s shoot, followed by stock-checking feminine sanitary products at a Croydon supermarket. His purpose, in illustrating that his training balanced both the creative and the data, was to suggest that this was something that had been lost in the fragmented, specialism-oriented marketing approach of today.
The main question asked of all in attendance was: “What have we lost in the changes of the last 20 years and how are we getting it back?”
He went on to refresh our advertising history knowledge, covering the aggressive drive for growth in the 90s and the consolidation of global media strategy, causing an eventual split between Media and Creative. A further segmentation arrived when Digital hit the scene in the early noughties.
However, as the world became more connected, marketing became less so, with competing interests for different content and devices driving more division and less solid strategy. This led, we were informed, to an imbalance between difference and relevance in advertising campaigns, with relevance driving how and what was put into the market and the difference of a unique, ground-breaking or thought-provoking creative losing out. This is key, as the power of difference delivers both a premium edge to a brand as well as loyalty from customers who are looking to identify with something out of the ordinary.
So what is the solution?
Ben Shaw, six years into a career at BBH and now Strategy Director and Head of Social quickly illustrated how fast-moving technological changes have happened, when he noted that Facebook had only 200 brand pages when he was a grad, Twitter and WhatsApp didn’t exist and online content marketing was in its infancy.
He pointed towards brands which are making the creative more accountable, using hard facts garnered through data collection to reintegrate the specialisms – difference driving relevance. Examples included Axe (Lynx in the UK) Apollo Space Mission, The Guardian’s Three Little Pigs, Google’s SBTV case study and the ASOS 2011 ‘Urban Man’ online initiative as campaigns which produced ‘connected thought’ across all their marketing channels and thereby drove ‘connected selling’.